Assessment of Behavioral skills

Are there any tools to assess behavioral skills that have been taught? I would love to see a whole lot of responses to this query please!

The short answer is, Yes. The tool you use depends on the skill being taught. Some vendors provide a behavior/competency assessment for the training programs they provide, some vendors provide assessments independent of the course provider.

Vicki Heath
Human Resources Software and Resources
http://www.businessperform.com

Hi there,

I am not sure that I am completely clear on the questions.

A couple of folks have addressed the issue of behavioral competenices and yes, there are a variety of ways to assess them as well as traits that might make a person more or less inclined to certain behaviors.

I assume that your question is related wanting to see some real behavioral impacts from training ( Can my people DO things differently after the training). In that case, the training program, in my opinion, need to be activity rich where people have to do things not just sit and be fed models.

Often I find that attaching workplace assignements to a training program creates a venue for the participants to use the ideas, concepts, techiniques in the course. I use a follow-up 1/2 day session for presentation of the assignments by all or part of the group depending on size, and I sometimes follow up with management 45-60 days later to see what behaviors have changed and how they have made a difference.

In addition , the training program needs to specify what behaviors should or will be impacted from the beginning.

Whenever some one asks me to deliver or design a short course, the first question i ask is: how will you measure the success of the course? How will you know your staff are doing things differently? This helps me to get to what the perceived gap is now.

Its very easy to pull together materials for a 1-2-3 class, its harder to be ensure that there are real behavioral changes that result.

Kirkpatrick was right..

Regards,

Bruncha

Hi!!
Bruncha,
Your thought allignments were very apt...Its always a question to ponder about,how effective was the training?,how long will it carry the impact?The issue of behavioral competency becomes quite challenging.What would you suggest to measure the attitudunal changes if any.


With regards
Tapan

Tapan,

Thanks for your comments. I would h ve to give this alot more thought. However, my high level comment is related to both social learning theory and planned behavior theory.

The social learning theory states that attitudes are learned by imitation and modeling,
and the planned behavior theory that suggests your attitudes influence your intention to act, and that leads to behavior.

If we accept these premises, then training design first has to ask the question:

What behaviors do we what are employees to exhibit? How does "openess to change" for example "look" like in real time?

We have to clearly acticulate what the desired behavior looks like then design activities, ie, simulations, roles plays group interactions, where the behavior is first modeled, and participants have to imitate and rehearse the behavior several times.

The workplace assignments that I referred to earlier would have to specify the when and how the same behaviors look like in the specific work settings.

Next step would be to have supervisors involved to monitor the behaviors. The system has to be build incentives ( rewards) for the right behavior.

How does results in attitudinal change? Well, part of the solution would have to be teaching rich content, how do we want you to think about yourself and the world and your reactions to it ( anger management programs come to mind)

Teach people to monitor self talk and learn to identify triggers, that lead them to undesired behaviors and given them techniques to insert or replace new behaviors.

People like Tony Robbins and others have demonstrated that if you adopt successful behaviors ( even when you dont have the thoughts and attitudes of those behaviors yet and they feel "artificial") over time you adopt new behaviors that influence your attitudes.

All this being said, to measure the attitudinal change, there has to be a time interval ( 90 days?) and then measure the frequency of new people and get the participants to maybe journal over new self talk.

Attitudes are the most difficult to change, so I dont see a "1-minute manager" method to this.

If wrongly aligned attitudes are creating a business problem, the a multi-faceted approach needs to be applied.

And lastly, the future recrutiment process may want to use some psychometric tools that identify the personality tendencies that associated with the set of attitudes that are successful in your organization and begin to target those potential hires more likely to hold those characteristics.

I know this was a long post, but I hope added some value.

Best regards,